TimeTabling: Analyzing timetables

For the course Data Science, topic XML DB I worked together with another student on analyzing the timetable data of the University of Twente. The provided data contained the schedule for 2013-2015, which includes which student sets have a planned meeting at which times, including the room, teacher and expected number of participants.

In the project we have converted the source files that were in the .xlsx format (made by Excel) to comma-separated files. Then inserted the data into an SQL database to perform some processing. After that we printed out XML databases with the relavant data per day. Then we used XQuery to calculate statistics of the data. The University was looking to find if they meet their goals for making the schedule, like for example having less than or equal to two hours per day in between hours (time in between scheduled meetings, which is mostly not used effectively). Next to this we were also encouraged to see what else we could find in this data set.

Results webpage

To visualize the results we have made a webpage with interactive graphs that show the most important results.

Paper

The precise results and methods used are written down in a paper, which can be found here.